


The Pipe

by Monochromely



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: :/, F/M, I couldn't sleep so I decided to write some angst, also I myself am angsty bc my spring break is almost over, blood warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 12:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13998393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: Natasha is seriously injured in the fight against Proxima Midnight.





	The Pipe

**Author's Note:**

> This used to be called “Proxima Midnight and the Eight Foot Long Pipe,” but the longer I stared at the title, the more I hated it. Cheers to my crippling perfectionism, and enjoy!

Deprived of her insta-kill death spear, Proxima Midnight simply shrugs, brushes the dirt off her leather clad shoulder, and proceeds to yank an eight-foot lead pipe off of a nearby building, brandishing it with a smile sharp enough to cut yourself on. The internal comm links connecting Steve, Nat, Sam, and Rhodey together ripple with appreciative whistles and very choice curse words. 

“If she wasn’t trying to kill us,” Sam riffs, circling the battle some twelve feet above, “I’d kinda be turned on right now.” 

Natasha, thighs fatally wrapped around an alien’s head, agrees solemnly: “I know, right?” She rams her elbow hard on the grayish skull, and the bone gives away more easily than she had expected; she rides the collapsing corpse down to the ground with a smirk just flitting across her mouth. “World domination is a good look on her. What do you think, Cap? Rhodey?”

“No objections here,” Rhodey deadpans, blasting a shrieking minion to smithereens with his arm phaser.

“Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten over the fact that her helmet looks like the communist insignia is sticking outta her temples.” Steve assesses the way Proxima’s spear feels in his hands as he speaks, turning it over and over, testing its mobility with a few practiced movements of his arm. It’s heavy—fitted more for close range combat than throwing—and as he sets his sights on the villainess’s attractively procured weapon and the leer on her preternaturally pale features and the challenge electrifying her stance, he thinks that he prefers close range combat anyway.

“Hey, ugly,” he calls out to her, a nice, mad grin slapped across his face, “decent spear you’ve got here! Thanks for letting me use it!” And Steve promptly buries it into the chest of the nearest approaching alien, watching with mingled horror and satisfaction as its promised poison tears a hole through the creature’s skin faster than the point of the blade itself. An acidic green sizzles through his scaly sternum like a mini-explosion. 

Rhodey, close enough to see it, sums it up with an aptly chewed up and quickly spat out, “ _Jesus_.”

Proxima Midnight takes her time approaching him, lead pipe casually thrown over her shoulder like a baseball bat. Her hips undulate hypnotically as she walks, swinging back and forth, back and forth.

“So there you have it, Mr. Rogers,” she purrs as Steve extracts the spear from the poor soul. Black blood like oil seeps across the concrete. His boots are soon drenched in it. “The strength of a sun poisoned spear. My dear father—I dare say you would have gotten the chance to meet him were I not going to kill you tonight—gave it to me as a present for my first murder. Isn’t it lovely?”

Up high, Sam is circling like a vulture, surely calculating the best way to attack Proxima from above.

He feels more than knows that Rhodey is flanking him on the right.

But something like a punch to his stomach ricochets through his system when he realizes that he doesn’t have eyes on Natasha. 

Her blonde hair.

Her staff whistling through the air.

Her boots crunching against the pliant bones of their alien enemies.

“Oh, yeah, very lovely,” he shoots back distracted, and all the same, attempting to distract _her_ , trying to buy some time to locate Natasha. “Nothing says fatherly affection like a devastating weapon.”

 _“_ Nat,” he hisses into his comm urgently, “where are you?”

“She’s behind Lady Evil, Cap,” Sam says knowledgeably, “taking her favorite stealth position if I had to guess—y’know, the one that always seems to lead to her crushing someone’s windpipe with her bare— _I can see you giving me the bird, Romanoff_.”

“Oh, I agree,” Proxima nods, now pulling the pipe from her shoulder and adjusting it into a fighting position, oblivious to the conversation taking place in the molecules all around her. “All of my daddy’s love is in that spear you have there.”

Eight feet of rusted steel is leveled straight at his heart. Proxima Midnight smiles a truly horrific smile, all of her pointed teeth on display. Steve positions his spear likewise, adrenaline sharpening his veins, tensing his muscles.

“I want it back.”

“Come and wrench it from my cold hands then,” he growls, hands tightening on the shaft.

She lunges.

Not at him.

“NAT!” Sam’s panic reaches him before the visual playing right before his eyes makes any kind of sense.

Proxima’s torso twists in response to Natasha’s long handled knife tearing down her backside, voice snarled in a yell as black blood drips down her costume.

In another instant, the lead pipe is sticking out of Natasha’s abdomen.

And there is red blood.

Too much of it.

Gushing.

Pooling.

And there is a hoarse scream that he’s never heard before.

That he’s never wanted to hear.

“NATASHA!” He hears himself yell, but his body has long left his voice behind, and he’s rushing at Proxima Midnight, all white hot rage and fear and fury, like she’d just stabbed his best friend.

Which, granted, she did.

She rises to face him, staggering, and from that unsteady movement alone—she’d sauntered so assuredly before— he intuits that the blade sticking out of her back has disoriented her, has weakened her, has given him the prime opportunity to plunge her father’s gift straight into her chest.

They fall together, his weight overcoming her injury, and Thanos’s daughter, his best lieutenant, twitches beneath him, her tall fingers grasping desperately at his face, drawing blood from his cheek. Steve presses downwards with all his strength, a grunt wrenching through his clenched teeth as he excavates her thick sternum.

“No! No! _No!_ ” It’s futile. It’s over. The moment the spearpoint breaches her heart, her scarlet eyes dilate, a supernova of dying emotion, a final stutter, and then nothing. A blankness.

What’s left of her alien army scatters, for Proxima Midnight, dread goddess of the Black Order, is no more. The poison and blood spurting around the spear creeps indelicately.

Steve stands up and does not relish the victory of his kill.

Natasha Romanoff is gasping her life away. 

He collapses on his knees next to her and feels bile rising up the column of his throat.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—keep your eyes open, Nat, you hear me? _Jesus, Mary, and Joseph_.” Sam is frantic, doing all he can to just staunch the blood that refuses to clot around the pole. His fingers are not enough. Steve joins in, and soon, his hands are sticky.

There is so much blood.

There’s too much.

And there’s nothing to say about it.

“Dammit,” he cries anyway, and his whole body dry heaves. “Dammit, Natasha.”

Dull, green eyes find his.

“Language, Rogers.”

A ghost of a grin.

And then just a low moan that rips through her bloodless lips.

He doesn’t trust himself to speak again.

He’s afraid that he’ll break if he tries.

“You don’t understand. I needed an ambulance yesterday...” Rhodey’s usual calm is replaced with desperation, with anger, as he stands off to the side on the phone. “We’re near the convenience store between 4th and...”

“Cap, I got this,” Sam orders, even though both of their efforts combined are streaming through their fingers. Proxima’s aim and power were true; the pole almost extends out of Natasha’s backside. “I need you to get by her head and keep her conscious until the ambulance gets here.”

“The blood—“ he argues, but he’s cut off.

“It’s a lot, but the pole didn’t hit anything major as far as I can tell, so right now, I need you to be there for _her_.”

He hesitates to move his fingers.

She must be on her way to losing half of the blood in her body.

He hesitates to look her in the eye.

To see the life that must surely be fleeing from it.

But Sam’s staring him down, and she is, too, and there are sirens wailing in the distance.

So he moves his fingers cautiously and wipes _her_ blood on his legs, and he crawls over to Natasha’s head. Her heavily lidded eyes regard him with something as inappropriate to the situation as amusement.

He can’t help but notice they’re glassy.

“Not my brightest moment, huh?” And she smirks—for _his_ sake, for _his_ consolation—and the whole perverseness of it all rents him in two.

“No,” he laughs painfully, his voice a hundred emotions thick. He cups her cheek gently. She’s cold to the touch, and there’s a thin line of blood dribbling warningly at the corner of her mouth. It refocuses him. Agonizes him. “Why did you do it, Nat? I could have fought her.”

“You could have ended up with this spear in your chest,” she returns quietly, and then she coughs weakly, little pops of blood landing on her chin. “I didn’t want to see that.”

“And you think I want to see _this_?” He gestures helplessly to the stupidly long pole protruding from her body.

(To think they’d all been turned on by it mere minutes ago.)

“To be fair, it’s only my abdomen.”

“Only her abdomen she says,” Sam mutters, rolling his eyes. “Y’know, just a run of the mill eight-foot pole to the abdomen wound. No big deal. No wonder you and Cap hit it off so well. Y’all don’t know when to quit.”

Natasha’s bloody mouth twitches.

“Status report, Sam,” he says.

“I have enough pressure on the brunt of the wound to staunch the flow for right now, but the ambulance needs to get here soon.” He looks over at Rhodey, who joins them, nodding.

“Ambulance’s ETA is two minutes.” 

“Stay awake for me, Romanoff,” Steve murmurs, more gently than before, the knot in his chest eased by Rhodey and Sam’s assurances. “I can’t... absolutely cannot lose you.”

He’s lost a lot in his lifetime.

Losing her would be too much.

She returns his gaze steadily; if the effort costs her, and he thinks it does by the way she's blanching, she doesn’t show it.

“Alright, Rogers.”

He runs his fingers through her hair and tries not to think about the irony of it being red. 

The ambulance pulls up in a cacophony of sirens and screeching tires. 


End file.
